Will the author be willing to explore that, though?
Summary:
- Spy x Family is a nice character-driven show to relax to, but it can be something more serious.
- Characters have the potential to be explored in a deeper way.
- Spy x Family may go Gintama's way and introduce more serious aspects later in the run because it already established a geopolitical base for the show to explore the characters further.
- But if it stays lighthearted, it will be fine, too.
There are certain types of shows that are used as pure entertainment. They don't have huge overarching plots, they don't have a solid direction in which the author takes the story, there's no set goal for the characters to achieve. Most of the time shows like this feel like an in-depth character study, the events in the plot are used mainly to add depth to the protagonists and not to move the story forward.
There's nothing wrong with those shows. And we can say that Spy x Family is one of such shows. But if you think about it, it has the potential to become something more.
Spy-flavored sitcom
On the surface, it feels just like a comedy with a fake relationship where both the adult characters lead double lives in Ms. & Mr. Smith style, with an addition of the mind-reading adoptive daughter. Sure, there's a lot of action that comes from the respective jobs of Loid and Yor Forger, the former being a spy and the latter being an assassin, and there's a lot of humor coming from the dynamics of this makeshift family, but it seems that the series is stalling and unsure of what it wants to be.
With the recent animated arc, we've got a lot of insight into how Yor views her predicament, and even before that, the show teased something that would've made the characters feel deeper, the world more palpable. Instead, it's as if the author of the series, Tatsuya Endo, doesn't want to get serious and deliberately keeps it as an entertaining slice-of-life with a little spy action to spice it up.
A shift to seriousness has been made before
Spy x Family follows the formula of a sitcom, and there's nothing wrong with that. But let us remind you of a show that seemed like a gag comedy for a very long time yet during its run became something with properly established lore, fully-fleshed characters, and dramatic twists that you wouldn't have expected in the first place: Gintama.
Calling these two stories similar is very wrong, but we already have some seeds planted in the lore of Spy x Family that will help Endo make this shift into seriousness, should he feel the need to do so. If you dig a little bit deeper, you'll realize that Spy x Family has a very interesting geopolitical setup and follows a story of victims of war that has an addition of the found family trope on top of it — it's just the focus is more on the found family and not on the war.
Gintama started in a similar way: the horrors of war have been mentioned in passing, the emphasis was put more on the newly built connections between characters and their family and friendship dynamics.
But the comedy was infused with the lore expansion and some flashbacks in the second dozen volumes that elevated the whole experience of Gintama readers and watchers, adding more to the character-driven show by building the world around the characters and explaining their motivations better.
Maybe Endo has planned a similar thing for Spy x Family: after all, Gintama has 77 volumes to properly convey the stories of its characters, and Spy x Family now has only 12. It's okay if Endo decides to keep it as lighthearted as it is, too. But the little crumbs of a deeper lore keep our hopes up.